


love and luck

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: Irregulars - Fandom
Genre: Cherries Worth Getting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First work for this fandom and i mean that literally, M/M, Nightmares, Whumptober 2020, kinda fun i get to make up all the tags and stuff, like hi welcome to the irregulars fandom it's just me out here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 06:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26847763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: whumptober day 5 - prompt: comfort (alt no.3)Keith Curry wouldn’t consider himself an especially lucky man. People who are ex-accidental cannibals don’t generally consider themselves lucky. People who had been anti-goblin to their coworker-with-benefits-turned-boyfriend who had turned out to actually be a goblin also don’t generally consider themselves lucky. Keith, boasting both of those accomplishments, had considered himself to be someone with a relative absence of luck.The key word there being had. Because he can hardly say now that he’s unlucky. Not when he’s curled up in a squeaky hotel bed in San Francisco, with one Gunther Heartman sleeping peacefully next to him, hogging the blankets and breathing deeply.
Relationships: Keith Curry/Gunther Heartman
Comments: 6
Kudos: 1
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	love and luck

**Author's Note:**

> hey what's up!!!! this is so exciting for me i am posting this fandom's first ever work! if you're here and you know what irregulars is you absolutely Have to hit me up i am going crazy all by myself in this fandom! this fic is set after cherries worth getting and keith and gunther are together but it's not super serious yet. please enjoy this, as it's currently the only published work for this fandom lol

Keith Curry wouldn’t consider himself an especially lucky man. People who are ex-accidental cannibals don’t generally consider themselves lucky. People who had been anti-goblin to their coworker-with-benefits-turned-boyfriend who had turned out to actually  _ be  _ a goblin also don’t generally consider themselves lucky. Keith, boasting both of those accomplishments, had considered himself to be someone with a relative absence of luck.

The key word there being _ had. _ Because he can hardly say now that he’s unlucky. Not when he’s curled up in a squeaky hotel bed in San Francisco, with one Gunther Heartman sleeping peacefully next to him, hogging the blankets and breathing deeply. 

Keith is trying not to look at him too much, because the way the moonlight is filtering through the window is making him look absolutely beautiful, silvery and radiant and  _ god, that sounds so cheesy, _ but it’s  _ true _ \- and Keith thinks he might love him, which is a little too much to be thinking at midnight, so he’s trying not to stare and trying to fall asleep and trying not to think about how he just might be luckier than he’d thought.

His resolute not-staring eventually gives way to sleep, and Keith immediately takes back his previous statement about having any luck as he falls into what he knows is going to be a  _ terrible  _ dream. 

_ He is standing in front of a stovetop, hand wrapped securely around the handle of a frying pan. A steak sizzles inside, seasoned to perfection and on its way to being medium-rare. Keith stares at it. He knows he’s dreaming, naturally, but that’s about all the control he has over the situation. Someone taps his shoulder. He turns around, looking away from the steak, keeping an ear on it so it won’t overcook. _

_ “Gunther?” _

_ Gunther nods, smiling, looking very pleased with himself. “Surprise,” he says, leaning in and pressing a kiss to Keith’s cheek.  _

_ “What are you doing here?” _

_ “Can’t I just come visit my boyfriend at his restaurant for no reason?” _

_ Keith flips the steak in the pan with a flick of his wrist. “No,” he decides, finally returning Gunther’s smile. “What’s up?” He turns away for a brief second to check on the steak, but when he turns back around- _

_ “Gunther?” _

_ He’s gone. Keith turns back to his steak, for lack of anything better to do. _

_ Someone taps his shoulder again. He spins around, already yelling at Gunther for wandering off without telling him, and stops cold. Gunther stands in front of him, all gleaming white bone and red eyes and a gruesome smile-if you could even call it a smile-on what passes for his face. “The meat is going to burn,” he says, his voice sounding exactly the same as it had a few seconds ago, when he’d been...just him.  _

_ Yet again, Keith turns back to his steak, feeling shaky and faintly sick. He looks into the pan. And screams. Sitting in the cast iron, cooking beautifully, smelling nearly done, is Gunther’s arm, or a cut of it, anyway. There is nothing immediately obvious on it to distinguish it as anything but  _ **_an_ ** _ arm, but Keith knows, instinctively. He stumbles backwards, and a pair of arms wrap around him, pinning him tightly. “Keith…” says the voice he knows so well. But it isn't Gunther, can’t be, because part of him is cooking on Keith’s stove right now…. He fights frantically against the arms, flinging up an elbow.  _

_ “Keith!” _

_ “Stop!” _

_ “Keith!” _

He jerks awake, breath heaving, sweat dripping down his forehead, and flinches backwards when a hand touches the side of his head. 

“Hey, Keith, it’s just me,” says Gunther’s voice, but the last time Gunther’s voice had spoken to him, he’d been cooking on Keith’s stove, so the reassurance does nothing. 

He’s trying desperately to get himself under control - he’s had plenty of nightmares similar to this before: cooking people, Gunther being a goblin and him being  _ not okay _ with it, but the two  _ combined  _ is something uniquely horrible. 

Before he can think about whether they’re really at the talking-deeply-about-their-deep-seated-issues stage of their relationship, which is surely what is going to happen eventually if he goes down this path, he’s crying and trying frantically to explain the whole situation to Gunther, which goes quite poorly and consists of a few garbled sentences, sobbed out breathlessly into the dark.

Gunther, for his part, is momentarily startled into inaction, having never really seen Keith  _ cry  _ before, but instinct takes over soon enough, and his arms wrap around Keith in a move that would be very comforting if Keith had just been dreaming about anything else. 

Instead, though, Keith jerks backwards, tumbling inelegantly off the bed, which, if nothing else, jolts his mind back into reality. “Ow,” he says, and laughs thickly, his throat still clogged with unused sobs. 

The light beside the bed clicks on, and Keith glances up. Gunther is standing above him, concern etched deeply into his face, and Keith laughs again, and then suddenly he’s back to crying, and he’d try to hide it but he’s pretty sure that bridge has long been crossed, so he just looks to Gunther helplessly instead. 

Having learned from his previous error, Gunther sinks down across from Keith, leaning against the edge of the bed, not reaching out to touch him, but sitting close enough that Keith can initiate the contact, if he wants. “It’s okay,” he says, because he doesn’t really know what else to say.

Keith shakes his head and sniffs. “You wouldn’t say that if you - if you knew what I was dreaming about,” he says, and buries his face in his knees. 

Gunther sighs, and very cautiously extends his foot to press against Keith’s leg. When he doesn’t pull away, Gunther speaks. “I don’t care what you were dreaming about,” he says. “You can’t control it. And you can tell me, if you want.” 

Ordinarily, Keith would stop the conversation there - he’d say something like, “that’s nice, but I don’t want to talk about it,” and leave it at that. But he’s still slightly out of it, and more than a little freaked out, and if he loves Gunther  _ (how can he not?) _ he supposes he should talk to him about this kind of thing. 

So he does. He recounts the whole dream, not sparing a detail, refusing to look Gunther in the eye. When he finishes, he finally looks up, half afraid of what he’ll see in his boyfriend’s face. 

Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this - pure compassion and concern and caring, so openly painted across his features that it damn near makes Keith start crying again. 

“Can I touch you?” Gunther asks. “It’s okay if you say no, I just-”

Keith nods after a second’s consideration. He feels less jumpy now, and the nightmare’s intense feeling has begun to fade, so that when Gunther’s arms wrap lightly around him, he just feels  _ Gunther, _ and not the snow goblin or the cooking meat of his dream. 

He melts into the embrace, trusting Gunther to hold him up and keep him steady. 

\--

Some time later, they’re both back on the bed - sunlight is peeking through the curtains, Gunther is chewing on the end of a cigarette and flipping through the case file, and Keith is leaning his head on Gunther’s shoulder, a hot cup of coffee in his hands and a warmth settled over his heart. 

Maybe he’s luckier than he’d thought, he reflects. Maybe he’s not. Maybe his luck doesn’t matter quite so much as what it’s led him to, which is this: he’s staring at Gunther, every bit as gorgeous in the early morning as he was in the moonlight, and Gunther has abandoned the case file and is looking right back at him with a look Keith doesn’t want to name on his face, and it’s a lovely morning in a grungy hotel which will turn into a less lovely afternoon chasing down a cannibal on the streets of the city, and he is in love.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! not that anyone is ever actually going to read this bc no one cares abt an anthology from 2012 that has no fandom but yeah. if you are part of that nonexistent fandom then like i said hit me the fuck up i'm @set-phasers-to-whump on tumblr or @natoirregularaffairsdivision which is my irregulars sideblog with no content on it rn but yeah. there you go. love u <3


End file.
